


Rouet des rats

by Lilliburlero



Category: King Rat - James Clavell
Genre: Ableism, Asexual Character, Disabled Character, Gen, Homophobia, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, Prisoner of War, Transphobia, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 17:40:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18154973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Vexley isn't as green as he's cabbage-looking, and he figures out what the King and Marlowe are planning. Worried about the possibility of a plague outbreak, he tries to get some others to help him intervene.Note: canon-typical homophobia and transphobia, ableist prejudice about facial disfigurement, some casual period-typical racism.





	Rouet des rats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [looselipssinksubs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/looselipssinksubs/gifts).



> looselipssinksubs prompted me for some _King Rat_ fic yonks and yonks ago. Here it is at last.

Vexley waited until after chow to go up to the theatre. He didn’t want anyone to think he was scavenging for the little extras they got up there. It hadn’t really occurred to him that going up at this time of day, he’d be among men suffering another kind of hunger, and it would shame him more to be accounted one of their number. It was so needlessly elaborate, and that was what made it sordid. _Unnatural_ was the word always used—he thought back to the scandal that had enveloped his fifth-form, to which he, in his housemaster’s words a Late Developer, had been wholly oblivious—but any moderately attentive observation of nature gave that the lie. (And nor, as a matter of fact, had Vexley, in the sense old Adams meant, ever Developed exactly, but that was by the by.) No, if they acted according to _nature_ the men would be licking and rubbing and mounting one another quite openly, as dogs and tom-cats and rams and drakes and frogs and—rats did, not fighting over that orderly with the shaved legs or trooping furtively up here in hope of a glimpse of an ersatz female. Though even then, there were analogies, plenty of them, if you reflected just a moment—nothing in the world was unnatural, because everything was part of nature. Idiotic word, that in fact always described violations of human _mores_.

He entered the auditorium. Four or five small huddles of men crouched in the front seats; among one of them a lazy game of two-up had begun. Rodrick and Parrish, those tall, handsome, awful men, occupied the stage: Parrish sprawled along the footlights, Rodrick perched on the edge with his legs tightly crossed, ankle wedged behind calf, his arms folded like a carved Red Indian outside a tobacconist. He raised one hand ninety degrees in salutation. 

‘Moby!’ 

‘Hullo, Brod. Frank.’ 

Parrish smiled disarmingly. ‘Hullo, sir. We don’t often see you up here.’ 

That was true. None of the varieties of make-believe in which the theatre dealt made sense to Vexley. He always put his name in the draws for show tickets though, so he had an officer’s front row seat to trade with. He’d actually gone to _Othello_ , but none of it came alive for him. The Moor was too very obviously Brod, sweating off his minstrel make-up as he roared and ranted, and Iago was Frank, a wicked man pretending to be a good one pretending to be a wicked one pretending to be a good one: how anyone could think that entertainment was beyond him. 

‘You’re shit out of luck, as our Yank friends say, if you’re looking for a part, Mobes. The one we’re rehearsing now is a three-hander. The work of Frank’s own fair paw.’ 

Parrish contrived to sketch a bow from his recumbent position. 

‘No—I just wanted to have a quick word. I say, what are these chaps doing here, then?’ 

‘Oh,’ Rodrick said lightly. ‘Crew. Lighting, props—costumes, make-up, that sort of thing. Mike and uh—Sean are showing them backstage.’ 

_They’re pimping her out_ , Vexley thought. The feminine pronoun came without hesitation. _The filthy rotten beasts._ No point in getting outraged now. He was probably the last man of all Changi’s eight thousand to realise it, he reflected. Just like in the Fifth. 

‘It was Sean I was hoping to see, actually,’ he said boldly. 

‘Join the queue, Uncle Tom Cobley,’ Parrish said, with an expansive sweep of his hand. 

‘Just to talk,’ Vexley said with dignity. ‘There’s something I’d like to ask—’ aloud, no natural pronoun was forthcoming, ‘—about.’ 

It should not have been possible for Rodrick to sit up any straighter than he was already, but he did. 

‘What—what do you think the rest of them are getting, if you don’t mind me asking?’ There was a dangerous cordiality in his tone. 

‘Well!’ Vexley exclaimed. ‘I’m sure I don’t want to speculate—’ 

‘Then isn’t it best, sir,’ Parrish said pleasantly, shading his eyes, ‘not to? Sean’s far too busy with the costumes to see you today, but perhaps if you came back, oh, the day after tomorrow? Rather earlier than this, and if you could bring a contribution to general gaiety—’ 

Vexley stared down at him with distaste. The Cyclopean look that usually quelled the classroom dunces had no effect on Parrish’s insolence. He smiled, and innocently rubbed his own face where Vexley’s was disfigured. 

‘Sean can work miracles with make-up, these days,’ he drawled. ‘Come on in leaps and bounds. We old pros are quite outclassed, aren’t we, Rod?’ 

Rodrick did not reply; he evidently considered the remark unsporting, but that didn’t help. It took most of what Vexley had to keep his hands off Parrish’s throat. Instead he reached into the improvised pouch around his waist and clutched the half-empty packet of Kooas that had been the wages of his—his ratting-out. He didn’t show his hand just yet, though. 

‘I don’t want Sean’s company,’ he spat. ‘I want to know about Peter Marlowe. Sean and he were in the same flight in Java, I know that much.’ 

‘Oh,’ said Rodrick. The monosyllable sounded like an echo in a deep well. ‘Glad you said something, old man. Save you a lot of time and—well, look, Marlowe’s rather persona non grata round here. He and Sean were very close, and now they’re very not, and it upsets Sean awfully to talk about him. We can’t allow it, not at this delicate stage. We’re just about to come off-book.’ 

‘Delicate,’ Vexley scoffed. ‘As if—your games of _charades_ actually mattered.’ 

‘But they do,’ said Rodrick simply. He was right, and Vexley, for all he didn’t understand how or why, knew he was right. 

‘Look,’ Vexley said desperately. ‘Peter Marlowe’s hanging about with the King.’ 

‘Buzz, buzz,’ Parrish interjected. 

‘No, but there’s more. They were in my class yesterday.’ 

‘Don’t tell me,’ Parrish said, sitting up on his elbows. ‘They’re running away to sea and they want to know how to harpoon a whale.’ 

‘Pipe down, Frank,’ Rodrick said, his two eyes on Vexley’s one. 

But Vexley saw the use in taking that well, and smiled tightly. ‘Not exactly. But I think they’re planning something very dangerous, and I don’t think they have any idea how dangerous it could be. A lot of men could die.’ 

‘A lot of men _are_ dying,’ Rodrick said, not unreasonably. ‘What is this plan, then?’ 

Vexley looked around, suddenly possessed by a taboo against tale-telling that long predated the fifth form in his personal anthropology. None of the aspirant stagecrew showed any sign of interest, still absorbed in their muttering and their two-up. But the atmosphere had shifted. ‘Not here,' he said. 

He wrenched out the packet of Kooas and offered it to Rodrick. 

‘Are you sure?’ Rodrick’s long fingers were already, acquisitively, on the packet. Vexley noted with a little base satisfaction that even he could not keep his fingernails clean, not in Changi. 

‘Take two.’ 

Vexley handed a single cigarette to Parrish, who took it with a matinee-idol smile, if one something yellowed and snaggled. The boy at the centre of the fifth-form scandal had the same irrepressible facility to rebuff contempt with amusement, Vexley remembered, though he could not now recall his face. It was a simple trick really, but it took more neck than most men had. 

‘Tell Sean—tell Sean that Marlowe needs—that Marlowe needs a friend. More than ever.’ 

Parrish opened his mouth, but Rodrick gave him a warning look. 

‘Will do, Moby,’ he said. ‘Take care.’ 

There was no more to say. Vexley nodded his farewells and returned to his hut. That night he dreamed that Peter Marlowe stood on the Changi theatre stage wearing Sean’s Desdemona negligée while the full house whooped, stamped, whistled and cheered. Vexley could smell their anger, lust and loneliness, and it scared him, but he stood up and clapped with the rest, hoping to remain inconspicuous. In Peter’s hands was a broad, shallow glass bath, in which, just covered by preserving alcohol, lay the Rat King that Vexley had seen in the Zoological Museum when he visited Strasbourg in 1926, the summer before he entered the Sixth.

**Author's Note:**

> The title, meaning 'wheel of rats', is an alternative, and probably spurious etymology for the term 'roi des rats', rat king.
> 
> The Rat King in the Zoological Museum in Strasbourg is a [real thing](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Strasbourg,_Rat_King_retusche.jpg) (cw: rats, dead animals, animal distress).


End file.
